12/06/2023
Earlier by Carl Horowitz: Law Schools And The American Bar Association: A Communist Partnership For Dismantling America
Black Harvard President Claudine Gay was reportedly the Republicans’ top target in Tuesday’s House hearing on campus antisemitism [5 takeaways from college antisemitism hearing, by Bianca Quilantan, Politico, December 5, 2023]. This criticism must have been a rude shock to Gay because she has previously soared comfortably upward on one of the most powerful thermals in modern U.S. life: black privilege in academe. Ever since the Floyd Hoax in 2020, traditionally white colleges and universities have been on a hiring binge of blacks for president or chancellor. Other beneficiaries: Daryll Pines (University of Maryland), Gregory Washington, right (George Mason), Vincent Rougeau (Holy Cross), Michael Drake (University of California), Dwight McBride (The New School), and William Tate IV (Louisiana State University). Some may be qualified, but we all know that’s not why they were hired. They were hired because they advanced the reigning anti-white regime called “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “equity,” properly known as DIE.
“Stefanik, who arguably gave Gay the worst grilling at the hearing, stood firm on her previous call for Gay to resign from the job she has had for five months.”
It’s long past time for @Harvard President Claudine Gay to resign. She needs to be fired. https://t.co/Y2puJgOTjZ
— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) December 6, 2023
The numbers are revealing. Of the 336 people hired to head colleges and universities from June 1, 2020 through November 30, 2021, 25.3 percent were black [Diversity on the Rise Among College Presidents, by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, February 13, 2022]. That’s twice the black share of the U.S. population. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 64.6 percent of the new hires, down from 78 percent during the previous 18 months. That some were headed for “Historically Black Colleges and Universities” only slightly alters the fact of black overrepresentation [What is an HBCU? Sites.Ed.gov]. What happened to Historically White Schools?
This black binge in college hiring is all the more striking because, across the entire college spectrum, black graduation rates lag well behind those of whites. A study in 2019 showed that 64 percent of whites and 74 percent of Asians who entered a four-year college in 2010 complete a degree at the same institution (i.e., did not drop out or transfer) within six years. By contrast, only 40 percent of blacks did so [Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups, National Center for Education Statistics].
Blackness advocates claim that blacks enrolled at predominantly white campuses would improve their grades if they had greater “access” to black mentors. Consumed by guilt, white officials have responded by insisting on diversifying faculty and administration. Over time, campuses have created ever-growing bureaucracies staffed by apparatchiks fanatically dedicated to reducing the presence of whites, expanding the presence of nonwhites, and disciplining those who object.
This obsession with closing racial gaps in entrance exams, admissions, grade-point averages and graduation rates — known as “disparities” in grievance lingo — has led to a situation in which non-whites enjoy more rights than whites. This holds especially true for admissions. Given a fixed number of slots — Harvard’s ceiling for each incoming undergraduate class, for example, is 1,600 — an increase in nonwhite admissions triggers a decrease in white admissions. It’s a zero-sum game [Supreme Court guts Affirmative Action, effectively ending race-conscious admissions, by Nina Totenberg, NPR, June 29, 2023].
And under constant pressure to expand black enrollment, white campus officials are loath to dissent. Why risk one’s job and possibly career over something unthinkable, like defending white interests? Non-HBCU governing boards and search committees, also fearful of retribution, view black leaders as valuable assets. Whereas most white leaders succumb to black demands, black leaders advance them.
The inevitable result: more black presidents. And these people are anything but bashful about their motives.
L. Song Richardson, the Asian-black president of Colorado College, justified Affirmative Action quotas with this ludicrous slice of Global Rainbow piety:
We need all the tools at our disposal to maintain and increase diversity. If we lose Affirmative Action, we also will lose the innovation, creativity, and creativity and imagination that are necessary to find solutions to the greatest issues of our time, such as climate change, poverty, hunger, health, and safety. Education is a human right, and when access to it is hampered, it holds back generations.
[Presidents Say Their Colleges Will Uphold Diversity Commitments Regardless Of Supreme Court Affirmative Action Ruling, by Shaun Harper, Forbes, May 4, 2023
Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr, right, who is black (though she doesn’t look it), argued similarly:
Affirmative Action is a tactic for achieving equal access, a tactic about which reasonable people may disagree, but I hope America will reunite to recommit to the principle that human value is inherent in us all, and will recognize that we still have a long way to go to make the ideals of equality a reality in this country.
The life of a college or university president is exhausting. It requires not only scholarly credentials, but also “people skills” in management, fundraising, and public relations. Whites who occupy this position walk a fine line to keep their jobs. They must put on a happy face not only for students, professors, and alumni, but also for anti-white activists within and outside the institution. A politician’s gift for sophistry is a virtual job requirement.
The advantage of hiring blacks for president is that they don’t need to summon techniques of sophistry. Supporting diversity comes naturally to them. That’s why they get hired.
As the pool of qualified black presidential candidates is limited, a university will pull out all the stops to entice black candidates in the event of a vacancy. If that means offering outsized salaries, benefits, and executive latitude, that’s the price of doing business.
Jonathan Holloway, Rutgers University’s first black president, for one, has done well for himself. Hired in January 2020, he arrived a half-year later with a guaranteed $780,000 base salary and another $195,000 in bonus incentives for the first year alone. He received another $185,000 after 90 days on the job to offset lost income from his previous job as Northwestern University provost. In addition, he will receive $275,000 in annual deferred compensation if he stays on the job for a certain number of years [New Rutgers president will get $1.2M, a house and a car when he takes over. Here’s the list of perks., by Adam Clark, NJ.com, January 30, 2020].
Other benefits include:
Not a bad deal.
Catering to the grievances of a consistently underachieving minority group would be counterproductive in normal times, at least in theory. But these are not normal times. DIE is completely woven into the Higher Education business model. Too many people have skin in this game to change course.
This mission will advance ever more rapidly if the U.S. Supreme Court regains its Leftist majority. The court’s diversity and Affirmative Action advocates have been seething ever since being outvoted in Students for Fair Admissions, a pair of rulings that barred the use of race as a factor in university admissions.
“The Court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society,” dissented the self-declared “Affirmative Action baby” Justice Sonia Sotomayor with breathtaking ignorance.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, right, who won her job on the strength of being a black woman, offered this:
With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces “colorblindness for all” by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.
Among Americans at large, Affirmative Action remains unpopular. In a 2019 nationwide survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 73 percent of the respondents stated that college admissions decisions should not consider race or ethnicity [Most Americans say colleges should not consider race or ethnicity in admissions, by Nikki Graff, February 25, 2019]. Opposition is strong even in “Blue” states. In 2020, by a 57.2-42.8 percent vote, California voters resoundingly rejected Proposition 16, which would have reinstated racial admissions quotas in higher education previously banned by 1996’s Proposition 209. It passed with an equally lopsided margin, 54.5-45.5%.
Such measures, however, are of little use if college and university diversity bureaucrats circumvent them. One of the more ingenious ways to keep racial Affirmative Action on the sly is elevating the importance of an applicant’s “holistic” or “lived” experiences. A racial minority applicant with low grades or SAT scores is granted admission if he or she presents an accompanying “How I Turned My Life Around” sob story.
DIE is even worse with so much Third World immigration. Consider the latest round of campus demonstrations. Examining photos and footage of rallies on behalf of Hamas terrorists, for example, one notices an abundance of ethnic Arabs, particularly headscarf-clad and masked women. One easily can imagine a black tidal wave of protest, looting, and violence in the wake of another Floyd Hoax. Indeed, after Floyd’s “murder,” students at not less than 44 public and private universities circulated petitions to remove police from their respective campuses.
Here is one doable alternative to mainstream academia’s frantic push for diversity — that is to say, nonwhite dominance: encourage black high school seniors to enroll in historically black institutions. Okay, so Howard isn’t Harvard; North Carolina A&T isn’t Duke; and Morehouse isn’t Emory. But an HBCU just might provide a good education, possibly better than the “prestigious” schools that encourage blacks to major in blackness. It also would be a lot cheaper. Black students would have more mating opportunities within their race, and most importantly, blacks would have a better chance at academic success relative to their peers. White students, faculty and administrators everywhere would heave a sigh of relief.
Rainbow radicals no doubt would react with horror over this “return to Jim Crow.” Let them squawk. No one will be forced to attend a predominantly black college or university.
As a bonus, Americans might be more apt to utter an unpopular but undeniable truth: A college education is a privilege, not a right.
Carl Horowitz is a veteran Washington, D.C.-area writer on immigration and other issues
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.